The Lasting Insights of Edith Wharton's Classic

 From LitHub:

On a fateful evening near the end of the novel, May Archer, née Welland, delivers a devastating piece of news to her husband, Newland. She then turns and walks out of his study, “her torn and muddy wedding‑dress dragging after her across the room.” They have just returned home from the opera, to which she had worn her “blue‑white satin and old lace,” in keeping with 1870s New York society custom that dictated women wear their bridal gowns out during the first few years after their wedding. Archer is struck with the contrast between this woman in the torn dress and the “young girl” she once was, whom he had blissfully anticipated marrying. How the pair have arrived at this moment, facing the “unbearable” truth of their marriage—that Newland Archer loves May’s exotic cousin Ellen Olenska—is the story of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel The Age of Innocence.

The torn wedding dress is the kind of precise material detail that Wharton excelled at, across a celebrated literary career that spanned more than forty years. A stand‑in for the impossible fantasy of the companionate marriage plot, the dress captures the vanity and oppressive conventions of her characters’ high society world and critiques the misogynistic fiction of womanly purity, even as it communicates the specific pain felt by two characters whose feelings of affection toward one another have become brittle and hard. The Age of Innocence is a brutal and elegiac novel with an ending that hurts, but pleasantly so, like a pressed bruise.

For all of its emotional heft, when it was first published The Age of Innocence was marketed as a nostalgic, escapist story. The novel went on to win that year’s Pulitzer Prize, the first awarded to a woman for fiction, in part for exhibiting, as per the award’s terms, “the wholesome atmosphere of American life.” Reviewing the novel in 1921, influential critic Vernon Parrington claimed that in it “there are no scenes, no vulgar jealousies or accusations, nothing to offend the finest sensibility.” Titling his column “Our Literary Aristocrat,” Parrington asserts that Wharton has a “grand manner,” a cool, aloof style and persona, which produces literature that “doesn’t make the slightest difference.” His comment neatly captures how The Age of Innocence, during its day, was trivialized by both its champions and its critics. Like wedding dresses themselves, the novel is easily misread as a costume drama.

In hindsight, the idea that The Age of Innocence offered a wholesome escape is almost incomprehensible. To the extent that the novel is still seen as superficial, some scholars have worked to establish its larger significance, particularly in its status as a “war novel” that drew deeply from the chasm of the First World War. Wharton began writing the novel almost immediately after the war’s end. She was living in Paris and had spent the war years in typically energetic, achievement‑oriented exertion, serving as the head of the American Hostels for Refugees, a large international organization that provided housing, food, and care of all kinds to those who arrived in Paris by the thousands during the war. In 1916 she received a noteworthy honor for her work when she was made a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor. To be sure, The Age of Innocence bears many marks of the world out of which it was born. It is a melancholic survey of a battle‑scarred and lost way of life, a big novel in a longer (but waning) tradition that explored America’s relationship with Europe, posing that relationship as an important component in intellectual and aesthetic life. (Read more.)

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